A couple of days ago, Ambassador Samantha Power, the US Permanent Representative to the United Nations, gave a speech on peacekeeping in Brussels that, among other things, lamented a decline in the participation of European personnel in UN peacekeeping missions:

Twenty years ago, European countries were leaders in UN peacekeeping. 25,000 troops from European militaries served in UN peacekeeping operations – more than 40 percent of blue helmets at the time. Yet today, with UN troop demands at an all-time high of more than 90,000 troops, fewer than 6,000 European troops are serving in UN peacekeeping missions. That is less than 7 percent of UN troops.

The same day, Mark Leon Goldberg wrote a post for UN Dispatch (here) that echoed Ambassador Power’s remarks and visualized her point with a chart that was promptly tweeted by the US Mission to the UN: